'Freedomland'

Not So Thrilling

 Stephanie Perez, staff writer

If I could use one word to describe the movie “Freedomland,” it would be messy.

I thought that this was going to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but instead it left you

confused and just wanting it to be over.

The movie is about Brenda, played by Julianne Moore, an ex-druggie and  

down-on-her-luck mother who gets carjacked outside of a predominately black

community in New Jersey. After about 15 minutes into the movie, she finally tells

Detective Lorenzo Council, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that her 4-year-old son

Cody was in the backseat of the car.

Of course, after hearing this, Detective Council goes around like a whirlwind telling police officers about the kid. He also manages to give himself an asthma attack in the process. This was probably the most exciting thing to happen in the movie.

Brenda then goes on to say that a Black man carjacked her, which brings in the racial factor to the film. The police, led by Brenda’s brother, then go into the Black neighborhood and put them all on lock down. This leaves Samuel L. Jackson’s character

caught in the middle of trying to help this woman and his community. It gets to the point

when the neighborhood people don’t want anything to do with Detective Council.

The thing that never really sat right with me were two things. One was that the police who were called in to control the neighborhood were indeed police officers and not

Klansman, because with the way they acted toward the black community, I was waiting to see some burning crosses. Another thing was that the police were all white; the only Black police officer was a jerk to the neighborhood people.

The movie also jumped around too much. At one point you’re in the middle of

this angry neighborhood, then you are back with the extremely disgruntled Brenda, who at one point was so uncooperative it was annoying. You know that Brenda is not telling Detective Council the whole story, and it takes Edie Falco’s character, Karen Collucci,

the leader of a group of woman who try to find missing children, to finally get it out of her.

I’m still trying to figure out why they even went to the to the orphanage,

“Freedomland,” in the first place. That part of the movie just seemed too out of place. You know a movie isn’t all that great when you know where they edited parts of the movie.

For example, Detective Council and Karen are talking, when out of nowhere, Detective Council says, “You ever been to Freedomland?” Then the next sense shows them walking in the woods outside of the town close to the orphanage. It’s just so confusing. You almost wish that you could rewind some parts of the movie just so that you could try to understand it.

I do think that this is the type of movie that you might have to see twice. But trust

me, once is enough. The thing about “Freedomland” is that you go in expecting to see a

fantastic movie, because of Moore, Falco, and, Jackson, but instead you walk out very disappointed.

The actors did try to save this movie, but it wasn’t enough. It was poor directing by Joe Roth. At best, you should definitely wait and see this movie until it goes out on video, which probably won’t be to long from now.